Were we an echo of an invented people
who left in our wake as we fled from each other,
belts of precious metals, pigment, spice,
a perfect drop of water
suspended in its singing.
At the exit of the planetarium,
a man with windy eyes
spins a copper globe.
A wall-gecko lashes
its tongue across the blackness.
I dream man as he was
and always will be - rocks of white gold
tumbling from his mouth -
and awake, a sputtering
coal in the grass,
picking the arcto-boreal krill
from another picnic's trash.
In the forest of our quarrels lies the future
buried, a museum
still lit and selling tickets
under the rubble of an exploded mountain
our people once thought impenetrable.
At port, a woman is unfurling her body
beneath the spiraled dive of frigate birds.
Her last breath - a watercolor, stolen by salt -
the flutter of a star's ignition.
